Grave new world of the hospital executioner

Mar 24, 2019 by Jill

by Julian Mann, The Conservative Woman:

JUDGING by the results of the Royal College of Physicians’ survey of its members on ‘assisted dying’, the moral world British hospital doctors inhabit would seem to be shifting towards the creepy hedonistic dystopia Aldous Huxley portrayed in his 1932 novel Brave New World.

The RCP Council’s decision to conduct the survey after announcing in January a ‘neutral stance’ on euthanasia was controversial. The evidence of that was in the correspondence last week in The Times from various doctors following Melanie Phillips’s article in the paper on Monday, headlined ‘We risk turning doctors into executioners – the Royal College of Physicians is stealthily promoting a change in the law on assisted suicide’.

But the RCP survey results, announced last Thursday, seem to be clear enough. Asked what stance the RCP should adopt, 43.4 per cent of respondents thought it should be opposed to a change in the law on assisted dying, compared with 44.4 per cent when the survey was last conducted in 2014. The percentage wanting the RCP to support a change in the law increased to 31.6 from 24.6, and 25 per cent thought the RCP should be neutral.

Asked whether they personally supported a change in the law on euthanasia, RCP fellows and members in favour of such a change increased to 40.5 per cent from 32.3 per cent, while those opposing it fell from 57.5 per cent to 49.1 per cent. The survey was completed by 6,885 respondents from more than 30 specialities.

So, it would seem to be the case that British hospital doctors are moving towards a position of moral neutrality about, or support for, the idea of killing terminally ill patients.

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